Communicating
Praekelt is a distributed company, which is a fancy way of saying the no-one is really obligated to be in the office when doing their work, as long as they’re doing it. Interns are strongly encouraged to spend the majority of their time at the Cape Town or Joburg offices, at least initially, in order to get to grips with everything.
Slack
But wherever you are, communication is fairly critical as a software developer. So we use an awesome communication tool called Slack for the majority of our communications and for staying up to date with company/office news. We rarely use email and that’s usually reserved for things like contract discussions. If you already have a Slack account or have no idea what it is, don’t worry, you will simply need to supply one of our admins with your email address (preferably not one associated with another organization) and you will be sent an invite. Slack is a great multi-platform messaging system and you can get the integrated app for most platforms, although the browser version also works well. You’ll get the hang of using Slack pretty quickly, but check this out for more guidance.
Email
Email is not that important at Praekelt, but you may need a Google account, because we do use Google docs and Hangouts.
VoiP
We use Skype and Google Hangouts interchangeably. As an intern, you won’t use it much, but if you need to screenshare in a presentation, it would be a good idea to have a Google account and the Hangout plug-ins installed in your browser.
In Summary
Make sure that you have the following:
A Google account
Skype and Google Hangout Plugins installed
A Github Account